1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a publishing platform for aggregating, managing, and delivering electronic content to connected consumer electronic devices.
2. Description of the Related Art
The education publishing industry faces a number of significant challenges to effectively delivering media and services through an on-line delivery network. These challenges center around four discrete phases:    1. Ingestion: A lack of digital textbook standardization, a plethora of incompatible formats, and a lack of integration and interoperability between publishers makes it difficult to ingest and aggregate a large volume of educational content efficiently and reliably.    2. Publishing: Significant transformation of education content needs to be undertaken to ensure that the content is suited to publish across a variety of client devices that users may use to access the content.    3. Distribution: In an electronic distribution environment, particular attention needs to be given to issues of content protection and rights management, as well as service policies and quality of service, so that content providers are fairly compensated and users of the content perceive the value and reliability of the service.    4. Connected Services: In an educational platform, there exists the potential to deliver a rich user experience that extends beyond electronic access to textbooks. To implement such connected services would require complex business rules and content models that are unavailable in existing education digital publishing services.
Effectively enabling and managing each of the above four phases has not yet been accomplished by the education publishing industry. Accordingly, this has inhibited the growth of delivering media and services through an on-line delivery network.